Introduction

This project looks to compare school data between States on the West Coast. More specifically, the project aims to make conclusions on areas of improvement within Washington, Oregon, and California and display them in a meaningful way. This is important because well displayed data can be a strong tool to gain attention toward issues within the school systems. This data focuses on three different categories; enrolment, financials, and academic achievement. Enrollment is taken from the National Center for Education Statistics. Financials is taken from the United States Census Bureau’s annual survey of school system finances. Academic achievement comes from the Nations report card that provides national and state results in main school subjects.

Summary Information

When looking at these two data sets we were able to find a lot of interesting information regarding lower level education within our country and more specifically the West Coast. We found that the total number of students in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California is 7290644. Out of all of the schools in these three states we also found that the largest school has 5912 total students. These statistics give us a sense of the scale of the education system within the West Coast. Additionally, out of all of these schools we found that 10 percent of them are actually charter schools. One common concern regarding our country’s education system is lack of teachers compared to students in a school. We found that in the West Coast the average number of students to a teacher is 21. Finally, another key statistic we found was that, out of all students on the West Coast, 55 percent of them qualify for free or reduced lunch at their school.


Summary Table

Here is a Public Elementary-Secondary Education financial breakdown for the states of California, Oregon, and Washington (Selected years: 2002-2016). The data was grouped by State and summarize calculations were done by finding the mean of the expenditures/revnues for every three years. The purpose of this grouping is to showcase a time series of the cash flows of the educational system finances for the chosen states.

Year State Instruction EXP Service EXP Capital Layout EXP Other EXP Total Average Expenditure Total Average Revenue Outstanding Amount
2002-2004 CALIFORNIA 29259896 16645927 7860871 2975396 59620688 58235079 -1385609
2005-2007 CALIFORNIA 32714378 19260311 10109943 3286416 69381309 66997198 -2384111
2008-2010 CALIFORNIA 35605862 21569765 8473287 3669495 74204021 71980848 -2223173
2011-2013 CALIFORNIA 34211058 20418439 6473495 3478754 69922234 69612746 -309488
2014-2016 CALIFORNIA 39026215 23718147 6428046 3777352 78730967 79951477 1220510
2002-2004 OREGON 2477559 1567558 549945 171959 5117700 4816902 -300798
2005-2007 OREGON 2834917 1797414 325893 189990 5539554 5366594 -172960
2008-2010 OREGON 3251619 2079101 666151 215476 6506863 6162073 -344790
2011-2013 OREGON 3257766 2065602 417965 227292 6286641 6104951 -181690
2014-2016 OREGON 3641021 2263649 491566 249502 6989066 7050376 61310
2002-2004 WASHINGTON 4320537 2507991 1148128 395506 8725008 8535587 -189421
2005-2007 WASHINGTON 4868311 2857718 1446491 444306 9999206 9723938 -275268
2008-2010 WASHINGTON 5826829 3412317 1710898 504833 11913037 11713109 -199928
2011-2013 WASHINGTON 5928417 3646851 1487470 525435 12071282 12034585 -36697
2014-2016 WASHINGTON 6621382 4483732 1776981 558040 13896578 13904668 8090

Take-Aways: When comparing all three states, we can see that California’s educational finances accumulated, on average, the largest total expenditures. We can also see that for awhile they’ve face a lot of outstanding debt. This could be interpreted as a funding flaw California faces within their educational system.

Though its also important to note that, California wasn’t the only state that dealt with outstanding finacial debts. Oregon and Washington also faced some financials issues throughout 2002 to 2013. It wasn’t until recently, around 2014-2016, that these states started to end their year debt free.


Chart 1

The purpose of this chart is to compare the average teacher to student ratio between the three West Coast States.

Some interesting observations:


Chart 2

The purpose of this chart is to identify any trends between the average student/teacher ratio and the average number of students, sorted by the type of locale(area). This chart can give us insight into what types of areas typically have high student/teacher ratios and a high number of students. These two continuous variables should move together as we look at more densely populated areas; this chart useful in comparing two continuous variables grouped by a categorical variable.

A couple observations can be made from this chart.


Chart 3

This chart is useful in analyzing continuous variables over time. The purpose of this chart is to identify any trends over time between 1993 and 2016 with the student enrollment of west coast states, Washington, Oregon, and California. This chart is not only useful in showing any changes in enrollment over time, but it allows us to see the differences between states.

A couple observations can be made from this chart.